Earlier this week, the official White House account jumped on a tongue-in-cheek post by GameStop to crib some credit for ending the console war. An eye-rolling, but otherwise uneventful AI-generated image of US president Donald Trump saluting an American flag with an incorrect number of stars.
A slightly more eventful post happened when the X account for the Department of Homeland Security shared an advertisement for immigration enforcement agency ICE, depicting two spartans in a Warthog under a Halo ring, with the caption: "Destroy the Flood". The Flood being a parasitic alien lifeform and major antagonist in the Halo series.
When PC Gamer reached out to Microsoft, Microsoft stated that it "does not have anything to share on this matter", but that doesn't necessarily reflect the people who made the damn thing—well, aside from one composer who's gone full MAGA. In fact, some are plainly horrified, per a recent entry of journalist Stephen Totilo's GameFile.
Totilo spoke with Halo's co-creator Marcus Lehto, who worked at Bungie until 2012 and was the art director for several of the earliest Halo games. Lehto doesn't mince words, calling the post "absolutely abhorrent … It really makes me sick seeing Halo co-opted like this."
Jaime Griesemer, who was a designer on Halo: Combat Evolved and a design lead on Halo 2, also told GameFile that, while the initial post of Trump squeezed into the Master Chief suit didn't offend him ("usually I take it as a compliment to Halo’s continuing legacy,") Homeland Security's post crossed a line.
"Using Halo imagery in a call to ‘destroy’ people because of their immigration status goes way too far, and ought to offend every Halo fan, regardless of political orientation. I personally find it despicable. The Flood are evil space zombie parasites and are not an allegory to any group of people."
As pointed out by fellow PCG writer Andy Chalk earlier this week, comparing immigrants to parasites or insects to be "destroyed" echoes the language surrounding some of history's most horrific human rights violations, and is certainly an escalation from the stunt Homeland Security pulled with Pokémon in September. Referring to any one group as subhuman never leads to anything good.
